CAKENECK by Kara Levy
The first dozen days of my graft are a lot like this one: long, sore, morphine-slow Atari days, falling asleep with the controller in my hands, while a square of my left buttcheek, under gauze, heals its adhesion to my neck. Marnie co-convalesces, although nothing is wrong with her. She lies on her stomach on the basement couch, eating Red Vines and reading Archie and Veronicas. When she falls asleep, her mouth hangs open and her retainers glisten like treasure. No one makes her go to school. After I lose a game and the screen goes dark, and if Marnie is not yammering about the contents of her Teen Beat, I can think about Ken Rothberg; people have asked me to, but I can’t remember a desperate or an out-of-control Ken at the wheel – only his braces gleaming in the sun as he reached over to the passenger-side door to let me into the car, the beginning of our illicit voyage to White Castle.
“Noble lady!” Ken said as I slid onto the passenger vinyl. “Seeker of burgers and sweetmeats!” He grinned until every metal square in his mouth was a firework.
Fourteen-year-olds are not supposed to drive, a thing that kids like Ken and me knew very well. Before this, we’d never gotten into any real trouble. Later on, the gossip was that Ken melted. Charred, then melted, like a marshmallow over a campfire. The way people said it, it was almost like they enjoyed the news. And why not? Ken was a geek. A metal-mouthed invisible bundle of baby fat. He was embarrassing at parties. He liked to pucker his mouth into a wet airkiss when girls walked by, then revel in his surround-sound orbit of “ugh”s. He called them “pretty babies” to their faces; when we were alone, he made up adoring nicknames for each of them – Goddess Tits, Oracle Eyes. We decided which ones would fall in love with him, and which with me. Because of Ken I sometimes got dunked in the girls’ room, and coming up, my hair a heavy wet flipper, the smell of piss and chlorine in my nose, I could hear the girls’ voices, light and sweet as though they were singing me happy birthday, telling me I was Ken’s prettiest baby of all. Everyone, even my parents, just assumed he was my boyfriend. When they told me in the ICU what had happened, I tried not to imagine Ken’s lips welding to his teeth in that wet airkiss that expected nothing in return. I hoped maybe Ken had just slipped away into ash, a delicate disappearing act, a different kind of melting: his acne and peach fuzz burning away into the kind of face that would finally amaze people into silence. It was not just the girls who saw him as comedy, but everyone – even the adults – and this just adds to their guilt now, the knotted muscles in their faces that are supposed to look like sadness.
Everyone says I am lucky. Burns are treatable when they are small. I only dimly remember a square of melting glass, the size of a business envelope, pressing into my neck as Ken and his mother’s pilfered Focus began to liquefy, and then large painful hands under my armpits, and the sounds of splinters and then nothing for days.
The graft took within seventy-two hours, and then I was allowed to go home. I noticed my reflection in the car window, waiting in the wheelchair for Mom to unlock the door. I looked like a boy in a movie with my scraped cheek and two black eyes, the gauze tight around the curve of my neck. Like someone tough, who had been in a fight. Someone who might impress me. Marnie, with her brand-new driver’s license, offered to get me anything I wanted from the store, but I couldn’t think of anything I wanted, only the things I would have wanted before.
She is twenty months my senior – my Irish twin; admittedly a weird term for two Jewish siblings from suburban Chicago – but we don’t look like twins at all. Marnie is tall and flat, a calm pale board of freckles, with horsy tan hair down to her waist. She keeps herself clean and brushed, her clothes bright, and when you are looking for her in an amusement park or at a picnic, you can never confuse her for another person, because only Marnie moves like Marnie, lifting herself off her toes with every step, her long arms swinging like ribbons. My dad says I’m a chip off the old block; like him, I am packed tight and solid, the brow heavy, the fingers thick. Even when I was little I had biceps like raptors. He tells me all the time how proud he is. He tells me it was smart thinking to roll down my window and scream for help when we were upside down in the ditch with our doors too hot to open. But I could have been smarter. If I were smarter, Ken would be here now, kicking my Atari ass and propositioning Marnie, telling her she has the hips of Aphrodite. Now Marnie has me sitting cross-legged on the floor as she hovers on the couch, combing what’s left of my dark hair. The right side is still long and heavy like hers, but the left side is buzzed tight from the singe. When I asked to shave the whole thing my parents said no; they didn’t want me to feel bad about looking like a boy. They didn’t realize what would make me feel good. The shag is soft and liquid in my hands like sea anemones. I have just had a Vicodin, so Marnie took one too.
“You have such pretty hair, Juju,” Marnie tells me. “You should let me braid it for you every morning before school. The side-braid is trés punk.”
“It wouldn’t keep,” I say, thinking of the cool, milky hands of the popular girls on my neck, the burble and splash of the toilet water. I know Marnie thinks of it too, but she just tells me I’m silly, that that’s what hairspray is for.
At first Marnie tried to protect Ken and me at school. She is one year ahead and acts in all the plays. No one bothers her or her friends; they move in a mass of oversized flannel and long flowy skirts, singing through the halls in happy unison like a pack of musical wolves. Once, hunkered down in the stall with Jess McEvoy’s fist gripped hard on my collar, gasping already, I heard Marnie swing into the dark bathroom and demand to know what was going on. My chest burned. I imagined her seeing me dripping with urine, or worse, Marnie’s beautiful long braid whipping hard over her head into the toilet next to mine, a grand finale. Go away, Marnie, I thought as hard as I could. I didn’t want to be saved that way. After the girls pushed her out of the bathroom, hard, wordless, Marnie never tried to rescue me again. Now she leans down and positions her hand mirror in front of my face, flicks open a compact in back. “See? What do you think? Aren’t you gorgeous, gorgeous?”
But I am not looking at the braid; I am looking at my neck, gauzed and taped like a Halloween mummy, the white square surrounded by little cuts, so small they could have been made by pine needles. My hands run through the noodles of the shag over and over again. They are sad dogs that need to be petted, and if I stroke them long enough they will feel better. “Looks good,” I say, and Marnie eases back against the cushions and says we should decide what we want for dinner, Butter Pecan or Rocky Road.
On Friday, I go back to school to find my locker plastered with Post-Its, note cards, and ripped-out paper from spiral-bounds. The handwriting is large and bubbly and bears the telltale syrup of girls. Feel better! they say, and We miss you! Although I cannot imagine how that is possible, given that these girls have never spoken a word to me before, except in the dark hollows of the bathroom with their sweet birthday voices and mean sharp fingernails. Ken’s locker is bare. There is not even any dog shit smeared down the vent; the tag in magic marker that was there before, declaiming Ken as fucktardus maximus, is not there, either. I peel the notes off of my locker one by one and stick them through the vents in Ken’s. I’m too embarrassed to keep them.
That morning I uncovered the graft, ugly without its gauze covering, a steamy, mottled piece of wax paper pressed painfully against the side of my neck. I came into the kitchen with my hand hovering just above it, like I was cupping my palm to my neck to hear a secret. Marnie was drinking the milk from her drained bowl of Cheerios, the box still open in front of her. She kicked my breakfast chair away from the table and poured some Os into my bowl. “Eat up,” she said. “No worries about being late today.” Then she saw my hand and put down her spoon. She made a waving motion like she wanted me to show her what I had under there. Slowly I turned profile and took my hand away, pushing the braid she’d made me behind my back.
Marnie sucked her breath in, a giant whoosh. Then she shoved back from the table and came up to it, very close, like it was a doe at a petting zoo. I stayed as still as I could.
“So?” I asked. “How does it look?” She took me by both shoulders and gave me one of her big stage smiles, the kind I see her sometimes practice in mirrors.
“It looks cool,” she said. “Really tough.” I blushed; I knew she was saying that because it’s the kind of compliment I like. She came behind me and undid my braid, swept long fuzzy waves over my left shoulder, hiding the burn like a curtain. “An air of mystery,” she explained, extracting the bobby pins and sticking them between her teeth. “Just let them have to imagine what’s under there.” I smiled all the way to the car and down the back roads to school, the star of a mystery scripted by Marnie, my hair long and glamorous over my shoulder, like hers. But in the lot, as Marnie threw it into park, I gripped her hand hard over the gearshift.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should wait until Monday.”
“But on Monday,” she told me, “everything will be different.” She met my eye with such a firmness that I started to feel like I might cry, I was so glad she was here with me, that this car made it all the way to its destination, that she was the driver, that I did not have to be smart.
The next Friday there is another note on my locker. All week the girls have stopped laughing as soon as they see me, hunker down into the warm, quiet smiles you’d give old ladies or newborn kittens. The guys pass me the ball in PE, but easy, and no one guards me very wholeheartedly or fouls me at all. I’m really better at D, but when I shoot a lay-up Nick Santoval, the most popular kid in the grade, gives me a high five and tells me nice one. Ken used to call Nick Santoval “Numb Nuts of Satan,” and whenever he saw Nick in the lunchroom or the parking lot, would bare his top braces and hiss ferally, claw both hands in the air, and say, “Allah, Jesus, and Hashem, protect your humble servant from evil and its numb nuts!” Then he did this dance like he was hopping over hot coals. He never cared if Nick saw. Nick’s not all that bad; it’s just that he’s dating Jess McEvoy, the girl whose yearbook picture is gummy-tacked to the inside of Ken’s desk drawer. What Ken never knew was that I have her picture, too, wrapped in foil under my socks. I ceded her to Ken when we doled out the girls in his room after school, who would fall in love with who, but it is hard to deny that she is the most beautiful, with her thick creamy blond hair, something you could easily gulp down your throat like milk.
You’re invited! says the note. Jess McEvoy is turning fifteen, so help her celebrate at a SURPRISE birthday bash at Claudia Wang’s house, 664 Rose Street, 7 pm Saturday. Don’t blow the SURPRISE! I turn the note over and over in my hand to make sure it’s really for me. Sure enough, there’s my name on the front, Julia Horowitz, with a heart on either side in that silvery gel pen that Claudia Wang uses on math tests. The bell has rung and everyone else is in class. I know if a teacher sees me out here she’ll leave me alone. No one tells me what to do anymore. I flip the note over again and imagine Ken here with me receiving it, whooping down the hallway with his giant curls bouncing, slamming his palms against the lockers and screaming, “Oh, baby, look who’s coming to town!” But if Ken were here there would be no note. I stick it in my pocket and go to class.
Marnie is coming with me, although she wasn’t invited. I hear her hairdryer blasting away from her bedroom, the clack of hangers falling onto her bed as she pulls out all her outfits. Mom comes in as I am tucking in my shirt. I am wearing my cleanest baggy jeans and my usual black T-shirt with the armsleeve hems cut off, to accommodate my biceps, which I hope are growing.
“Julia?” Mom asks from the door, and I beckon her in. She is tall and elegant like my sister, and always calm. When we were little she dressed us in matching sweaters and took us to the park, and every time I snuck a glance at her she would be in the same position, upright on the bench, smiling at us, like there was nothing else in the world she had to do. Now her eyes flick over my clothes, disapproving. “You look nice,” she says. Mom sits on the bed and puts her hands between her knees. “I’m glad you’re going to go have fun,” she tells me. I shrug. I want to tell her I don’t know if this is going to be fun. I’ve never been to a high school party before.
“I just want to say, I know how these parties are sometimes, and with your pain drugs, it’s important you don’t drink any alcohol,” she says. Her voice is tight.
“Mom, I wouldn’t do that.” I wonder if she knows that she is sitting directly over Ken’s and my Xerox box of empties, which we keep under my twin bed. Sometimes if you bounce hard enough you can hear them tinkling, the sound of glass about to break.
She smiles and comes over to me, holds me by both shoulders. “Of course not,” she says. She brushes some hair out of my eyes. “I just love you so much, Juju. Do you know that? You are the light of my life.” I think I might cry so I bite the inside of my cheek and try to look strong. She kisses me on the forehead and slips into the hallway, and as soon as she is out of the room I crawl into the closet and sit in the dust in my clean jeans and just let it all out, like a girl.
When Marnie comes in I am still in the closet, sniffling. She crawls in there with me, smelling of lavender. In the dark she says, “Yoo-hoo. I’m here to do your makeup.” She is sitting in a laundry basket filled with all the stuffed animals we used to play with. “Are you crying?” she asks, leaning toward me. I shake my head, not too hard, so that my neck skin doesn’t stretch. She holds her hand out and I slap mine in hers, like a low-five, although I know that is not what she meant. “We’re going to have so much fun tonight, you and me,” she tells me. Then she says, “Ow, ow!” not like something hurts her, but like she is excited and about to break into a full performance of the electric slide.
Our mother recently gave Marnie a long flat tray, its square hollows filled with eye shadows and blush-ons, its round ones with dark, waxy circles of lip color. It is the most recent in her efforts to help Marnie, with her wild grassy ponytails and her flappy dark overalls, become more of a lady. She’s never tried that with me. I see it from inside the closet, lying on the rug along with a packet of Roy G. Biv permanent markets, every color represented, and a clutch of tiny paintbrushes meant for finishing model soldiers.
“I don’t really want makeup,” I tell her, wiping my face as she flattens the stuffed animals, crawling from the closet. After a moment, I follow her.
“I know,” she says, unfastening the tray’s silver snaps. She looks at me slyly. “I have something else in mind.” I let her braid the right side of my hair because her fingers feel so good on my head. She finishes it with pins, then hairspray, and we both cough. She laughs. “We’re going to have to get better at that,” she says, and turns me in profile so she is face to face with my burn. She takes the little plastic ringsleeves off the top of the paintbrushes and uncaps every permanent marker, one by one, with a pop.
“What are you going to do?” I ask, suddenly breathing harder, and my burn stings in advance because I know she is going to touch it.
“Sit still,” she says, and I do, rigid as a slap, because Marnie is always right about what’s good for me. She uses both hands on my neck, her face so close I can feel her hot breath and smell her lavender perfume. The paintbrushes are soft and ticklish, but the nibs of the markers are tougher and pull slightly at the skin. More than once I wince. “Okay?” she asks, and I nod. “Not bad,” she says, with a paintbrush between her teeth, “for my first tattoo. But don’t move, it’s not done yet.”
My eyes go wide and my stomach clutches. “A tattoo?”
I can feel her smile.
Ken and I were stunned when we learned in our Bar Mitzvah class that Jews can’t have tattoos. Mrs. Edelman says that if you get one, you can’t be buried in a Jewish graveyard. Ken said if he weren’t Jewish, he would get a scorpion on his back, just above the shoulder blade. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just get them anyway; it’s not like we really cared about being Jewish, and by the time it was our turn to be buried, our parents, the only ones who minded, would be long since dead. No one would be left to be disappointed in us. I remember when Ken’s parents came to see me in the hospital, sweet blond people who called Ken Kenneleh. Mrs. Rothberg just hid her face and shook into Mr. Rothberg’s shoulder, like I was the last thing on earth she could bear to look at, worse than a scorpion on Ken’s shoulder, worse than the accident itself.
“Done,” Marnie says, and she falls back on her heels, her eyes bright with happiness. When I turn sidelong to the mirror my neck is more beautiful than I could ever have imagined. It is a three-layer cake, red, blue, and yellow, with three candles burning brightly. Marnie has even included uneven drips of frosting along the sides, like we iced it ourselves. The mottled skin underneath warbles uncertainly. It looks, with the rippling effect, like the candles are really on fire. Like they could burn you if you got too close. “Now if that’s not festive, I don’t know what is,” Marnie says, and I have never felt so tough in my life, never so much myself, like I am ready to use my biceps on those girls if they lead me to the bathroom, like I am ready to show them how to use their soft, milky hands, just where they can put them.
Claudia lives in a fancy part of town where the houses have triple stories and double garages. By the time we get there, we have to park four blocks away and the lawn is already littered with crushed beer cans. Marnie doesn’t even knock when we get to the door, just bursts through and cries, “Surprise!” But it’s obvious we’ve missed the surprise, and the music is too loud and everyone too involved to even notice we’ve arrived. I’m glad.
Soon Claudia Wang comes up to me with two little frosted cups filled with Jell-o. “Hi, Julia, I’m so happy you could come.” She hugs me and her hair smells like beach towels. I don’t know what to do with my arms because the closest I’ve ever been to Claudia is to her kneecaps, inches from my nose, as another girl dunked me toward the surface of the water. Now she hands me one of the cups of Jell-o and tips the other back into her mouth, quick, not chewing. She makes a motion like I should do the same. It slides down my throat like a slug. “Everybody’s out back,” she says, and grabs me by the elbow, steering me through the kitchen and into her darkening backyard, where all the popular kids are crushed into the hot tub, the steam rising up around them as though the heat is not coming from the water, but from their bodies.
Nick waves from the tub and raises his plastic cup, and then the rest of them notice me too. When they see me, they look scared. Then they smile with all their teeth, and a cascade of “Hi, Julia” ripples through the water like a stiff deck of cards.
“Hop in, Julia,” Claudia says, “it’s super warm.” It’s then that I notice that a few of the girls aren’t wearing their bikini tops, and that under that steamy water are the perfect breasts of Jess McEvoy, and underneath those, the rest of her. I can hear Ken’s voice in my ear: Allah, Jesus, and Hashem!
“No thanks,” I say, and no one pushes me or even tries to make me change my mind. I perch by the edge of the tub on a lounge chair and Claudia brings me an enormous cup of beer before pulling her slipdress over her head and climbing back in. Under the water the bodies of the popular kids warble, close together like stems in a bouquet. From up here they all look the same.
“Hey, Cakeneck,” says a boy in the water. I don’t recognize him but he’s tall and tan, the sort who could easily slide into the tub with these people. The others hush him quickly. “Don’t,” someone says.
But I say, “Yes,” and I can feel the corners of my mouth curling, because that is just the kind of tough thing I have always wanted a guy to say to me.
“Who did your piece? It’s sweet,” the boy says.
“My sister, Marnie Horowitz,” I tell him. “She’s in tenth.” Just weeks ago these same people would have told me I was a fucking liar, or that it wasn’t a real tattoo, or tried to pull my pants off to see if I had any more where that came from. But now they are all quiet, sipping their beers and looking at me as though I am a delicate piece of crystal.
“I’m Hank Diers,” he says, nodding his approval. “I go to Langley.”
“I’m Julia,” I say, “but you can keep calling me Cakeneck.” Then someone laughs from the middle of the tub, and I realize it is Jess, throwing the wet tips of her long blond hair behind her.
“Cakeneck,” she says. “I like that.”
When she stands up she rises out of the water in one smooth motion, the water sliding off of her as though her body is made of oil, and she turns directly toward me and squeezes the ends of her hair out into the tub. A few drops land on heads, and the others laugh their complaints. There are her pale teacup breasts, pointed right at me like eyes. I swallow. Someone, not Nick, wolf-whistles loudly.
“C’mon, Cakeneck, let’s go get some beer.” She laughs like she has just let a golden bird out of her mouth, and her breasts shake above the others’ heads. Nick forces a towel into her hands and she takes it, stepping out of the tub in two quick lifts of the knee. When she slips on the smooth rocks of the path, I grip her elbow and she smiles at me, a big lazy smile, and I see that she is very drunk. “Come on, Cakeneck,” she says again, and although I hear the hot tub whispering I follow her, my arm outstretched behind the small of her back in case she falls, because I know that is what a gentleman is supposed to do.
She passes quickly through the kitchen and waits for me on the first step of the staircase. I look over into the living room. Marnie is in there, spread out on the rug with some others, watching a redheaded boy do a card trick. As I start to climb the staircase I hear her clap and say, “Again!”
I follow Jess silently, and as we ascend the voices of the others get smaller and smaller, so that when we are at the very top it almost feels like we are in the house alone. She twists a doorknob with a fluffy pink bear hanging from it. Inside is Claudia’s room. A pile of patent shoes in bright colors, a Hello Kitty alarm clock with bright eyes and alert splayed hands, pictures of Claudia and the other girls at the beach. In the picture over her desk, the girls are so far from here, so happy and sunburnt, that they almost look nice. In the center of the room is Claudia’s bed, a wrought-iron double with a white eyelet comforter, unmade. Jess sighs and throws herself onto the mattress, as though it has been so tiring, the Jell-o shots, the beer, the Jacuzzi. She whacks the end of the bed with her foot, a whack for me to sit.
Jess deadlifts her legs and lowers them wetly onto my lap. It is strange to see her so close up and docile, her straight brown legs with their fine golden hairs laid out like sleep. I remember Ken asking me once as we lay in the grass in my backyard, What do you think Jess McEvoy sleeps in? I had guessed shorts and a T-shirt, and Ken had guessed “au natural.” When I unwrap her picture from my sock drawer, I never picture her sleeping. I picture us at the movies in a town where no one knows us, Jess wearing my sweatshirt because she is cold, checking my face at the funny parts. Tentatively now, I rest my hand on her ankle.
“Can I ask you a really serious question?” Jess says. I nod my head yes. She doesn’t look up for my answer. “Were you scared you were going to die, when you were in that car?”
“I can’t remember,” I admit.
“What about in the hospital? Did you see a white light?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think that’s how it works.” She angles her arms behind her head and her blond hair spreads across the pillowcase, like butter on toast.
“I think it would be amazing to die.” She is fixed on the ceiling but not looking at anything, drifting into some far-off place. “Imagine all the people who would love you.”
“People love you now, Jess,” I say, then feel my face flush realizing how pointed that sounded. I keep my hand very, very still on her ankle, afraid that if I move it she will jackknife out of her reverie and shove my face against the wrought-iron curls of Claudia’s bed. She will tell me I’m gross. But she doesn’t seem to notice.
“I know,” she sighs. “But it’s not the same. It’s not, like, planned love. Like, if you know you’re going to die ahead of time, you can tell people everything you want, and they just give it to you.”
“Is that what happens?”
“Of course it is.”
“Like . . . magic?”
“No, not like magic, Julia.” She snaps back to annoyed attention and lifts herself up on one elbow. Her eyes are beer-dull. “Don’t you know there’s no such thing as magic? What people think of as magic is just other people making things happen.”
I imagine Ken responding to this, a sweeping bow and then, “M’lady, with all due respect, I wouldn’t anger the gods if I were you.” Besides, Ken is dead, and I don’t see Jess McEvoy loving him now.
“What happens when you’re going to die,” Jess continues with authority, lying back, “is that whatever you say goes. If you want ice cream, you get ice cream. If you want someone to drive you to Graceland and back, even just for the day, they do.” I watch the slim slope of her nose and her slick strawberry lips. There is a pimple just above her mouth, caked over with heavy makeup.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Because,” she says haughtily, “I saw it. Like my mother, she got a television set and pearl studs.”
I move my hand slightly across her ankle. “Did your mom die?”
“Duh,” she says, “everyone knows that.”
“I didn’t,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Jess, and when I look at her face it is unmoving, like she’s in a waiting room alone.
“Is that what you want to do? Go to Graceland?” I’ll take you there, I want to add, although I’m not sure where it is.
She scoffs. “No, that’s stupid. I’d probably want to meet Justin Timberlake. He would come to my house and lean down over me” – she stretches and rolls onto her stomach, her mouth so close to Claudia’s pillow that the slightest move would be a kiss – “and he’d say ‘Whatever you need from me, I’m here, I’m all yours.’ ”
“That doesn’t sound like something Justin Timberlake would say.”
Jess tosses me a nasty glance and then turns back to Claudia’s pillow, her nose closer than ever to the cloth. “He would take my hand and tell me that I was amazing, that there was no one in the world like me.”
I think I will not be able to take what happens next, if she lowers her mouth to the Justin Timberlake pillowcase and gives it the French kiss of the dying. Her feet are still heavy on my lap. But Jess just hovers for a few more moments, moistening the pillowcase with her breath. Then she sits up and smiles wanly at me. She looks vague and crumpled, like she just woke up. I scoot a little closer to where she is perched by the head of the bed, then take her hand in mine. I am really holding Jess McEvoy’s small, sweaty hand and I watch it, as if for a suggestion as to what I should do next. It just stays there, motionless, waiting for my signal.
“You are amazing,” I tell her hand slowly, “and there is no one in the world like you.” When I look up she is crying, her green eyeliner and the soupy dust from her mascara pooled in arcs under her eyes. She squeezes my hand.
“Oh, Julia, you’re sweet,” she says. “But you can only say that to someone when they’re dying. If they’re not dying, nothing you say counts.”
It’s completely dark outside Claudia’s window and downstairs I can hear Marnie calling my name. There is a little song to her voice, so I know she is drunk. Jess has fallen asleep with her ankles on my lap, and the front of my jeans are damp from their runoff and her nearness. In the blue dark I watch her toweled chest rise and fall, and she looks so small there, so different from the girl who knuckled me into toilet drains and asked me, laughing, if Ken’s balls were salty. Now she just looks simple, like she could wake up with no ideas or opinions, and behind her smile there would be nothing, just a readiness.
After a few minutes I ease her ankles back onto the bed and slip out of Claudia’s room and down the stairs, where Marnie is still calling for me. She grabs me by the shoulders and grins. “What have you been doing up there, Juju?” I tell her I was sitting with Jess McEvoy and she laughs like I have just told her I was taming barracudas with a swizzle stick. I can smell beer on her breath and her eyes look heavy. She takes both of my hands and spins me around, then twirls under my arm and dips herself against my jeans.
“You’re all wet!” she says. “Did you go in the Jacuzzi?” I just shrug. I don’t like her when she’s like this.
It’s eleven thirty and our curfew is in fifteen minutes. Marnie takes her keys out of her pocket.
“We better blow this joint,” she says, swaying as she meets my eye. “If we don’t want to get grounded.”
“You’re drunk,” I remind her, and all the smartness I willed myself to have on that day with Ken, the firework of his braces, the vinyl of the Focus, Ken’s bitten-down cuticles white on the wheel, surge up like a bad meal.
“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, Juju,” Marnie says, taking her most reasonable tone. “Do I ever lead you astray? Do I?” I don’t know what to say, because she never does. I see her eyes move to my neck, then lighten. “Your cake looks so amazing,” she says, clapping. “Did everyone tell you how cool it is?” I nod solemnly. She leans in. “Because they were talking about you out there. They were calling you Cakeneck!”
“I told them they could,” I say. “You can call me that too. I like it.” She looks confused for a moment and then laughs and pushes my shoulder, like I am a big kidder. I take her hand in mine and then pry open her fingers. She barely resists as I ease the fistful of keys out of her grip and put them in my pocket. Then she drapes her arms over my shoulders.
“Maybe tonight,” I suggest into her ear, my heart hard against her chest, “you could teach me how to drive.”
“Yes!” she squeals, her voice too loud next to my cake. “Juju,” she continues, holding me tighter, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and over her shoulder I can see Jess McEvoy’s legs at the top of the stairs, and then the rumpled white towel, and finally her face, looking down at us stonily like she is watching a movie in history class, something from a time that doesn’t belong to her.
The key fits easily into the ignition and the car rumbles to life. Marnie, beside me, is guiding me through each step. My hands are shaking. Outside the car, the street is dark and the party is far away.
“Now put your hand on the gearshift and your foot on the brake pedal,” she says. “Pull the gearshift back into reverse.” My throat is tight and my eyes feel full. I don’t want her to see me cry. When Ken did this it looked so easy – ungraceful but easy, like everything Ken did. I hold on to the bulb of the gearshift as hard as I can and stamp the brake pedal against the mat. “You can do it, Cakeneck,” she says, and when I look over at her she is smiling, her head pressed back against the headrest, looking at me like I am her masterpiece.
We jerk rapidly backward over the curb and Marnie yells, “Brake, brake, brake!” and then laughs as we come to a halt. Slowly she coaches me into drive. We inch haltingly toward home as I smash the gas then the brake in bursts, and at every stop sign, although she rolls her eyes, I check her seatbelt with a tug.
We are two blocks from home when the headlights graze something fast and low in the road. Even though we are not going very quickly, it skims my eye. I am sure it is a person’s head rolling across the double-yellow, hair whipping. I am going to hit and kill it. I yank the wheel hard right, away from the head. I throw both my shoulders into it. Marnie’s ponytail whips across her face as we strike the curb and ascend it with a jolt, and then peter to a halt on someone’s lawn, our back wheels jacked up on the cusp of the street drain.
At first Marnie is quiet, and then a series of choppy “ha”s begin to shake her. I think she is laughing until I look over at her, just in time to see her cover her face with both hands and double over, nose to her knees and her back bouncing.
“Are you okay?” I say. “I think it was a raccoon,” but Marnie just sobs like she has been waiting for this, like that raccoon was an actor in one of her plays and he performed the scene all wrong. I haven’t seen her cry like this since we were small. I rub my hand across her back. “It’s okay,” I say. “We’re not hurt. We’re doing a good job.”
“Get Mom,” I hear her crying from under all her hair. “Get Mom. Please, just run home and get Mom.” I am glad for some directions that don’t involve driving. Outside the air is warm and dark, and I can hear the whoosh of cars in the distance, but there is no one on the street. I run right down the middle of the road, all the way to our house where the porch light is on and, through the front window, I can see our parents waiting at the kitchen table. I am ready to let myself in with my key, casually tell them about Marnie’s silly driving goof, like it is all a joke, and then laugh together for a moment before wandering down the road, shoulder to shoulder, to ease the car back onto the road and go for home. But something comes over me in the yard and then I hear screaming break the air. “Help! Help!” It’s my voice but it doesn’t sound like me, and I can feel the pressure through my neck and down my cake and through my throat as the noise pours out.
My parents are on the porch in seconds, rigid and quick, so close to me, asking me what is it, where’s Marnie, and suddenly I am just crying, limp in their arms, and I can feel the cake melting in the humidity, the makeup hot and thick on my neck, and I realize this is what I forgot to notice when I was unconscious in the hospital; this is what my parents looked like when they learned what we had done; this is what Ken and I created when we decided the world was not big enough for us.
My mother’s hand grazes my neck and comes away with red and yellow paint. Even in the dark I can see her face blanch. “What have you done,” she whispers, and I try to tell her it’s okay, it’s just cake, it’s not a real tattoo and I can be buried in the Jewish graveyard, but before I can say it she is crying too, and wiping the hem of her nightgown across my neck. It hurts where the skin pulls, and I can see her leg, long and white and fuzzy, rooted in the grass.
“Where is Marnie?” My dad is shouting now, his fingers hard on me and voice as tight as guitar strings, and I can only point limply down the road to where Marnie is waiting in the car, tipsy but perfectly fine. My mother drops her hem and shows me her palm, a brief stay-dog, and they take off at an awkward adult sprint, my mother’s robe flapping behind her. As I watch them recede I hold myself very close, until they are just specks in the darkness and I am alone in the yard, the house bright behind me with its lit windows and its door ajar, still swinging on its hinges as though whoever just departed will be right back.
Kara Levy’s work has appeared in Narrative, The Mississippi Review: Prize Issue 2009, and Zen Monster.